Author's Forum Presents: Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony: A Conversation with Daniel Herwitz and Adam Ashforth

U-M Professors Adam Ashforth and Daniel Herwitz discuss Herwitz's new book Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony.

The act of remaking one’s history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism’s history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny.

Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.

Daniel Herwitz is Frederick G L Huetwell Professor, Prof of History of Art, Prof of Philosophy, Prof of Comparative Literature, and Prof of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and holds an honorary position at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book is The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is also the author, with Lydia Goehr, of The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera and the editor, with Michael Kelly, of Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto. From 1996 to 2002, Herwitz served as chair in philosophy at the University of Natal, Durban, and was embroiled in the South African political transition, which led to his book Race and Reconciliation: Essays from the New South Africa. Long involved with modern Indian art, his 1987 book, Husain, won the country’s National Book Award.

Adam Ashforth is Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies. He has published extensively on state formation and the political implications of spiritual insecurity in everyday life in South Africa. During South Africa's transition to democracy he spent many years living and writing in Soweto. He is currently researching responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in everyday life in rural Malawi and ethnic conflict in Kenya's Rift Valley. His publications include three books: The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford, 1990); Madumo, A Man Bewitched (Chicago, 2000); and Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (Chicago, 2005) [winner of the Herskovits Award, 2005]

The Author's Forum is a collaboration between the U-M Institute for the Humanities, University Library, Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, & Ann Arbor Book Festival.

Additional sponsorship for this event provided by the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Philosophy.